‘We might feel uneasy, but we’ve internalised the need for the “joke-teller” not to feel uncomfortable, not to hurt his ego or wound his pride by not laughing at his joke’
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How many of us have felt this: we’ve been somewhere, maybe our workplace, maybe the pub or a party and someone’s made a comment or told a joke that simply isn’t funny. It might even be offensive.

What used to happen – and what I’ve done a thousand times – is give a hollow laugh and move on. That’s the way it once worked. The person telling the joke is able to save face, the heat is diffused, there’s uneasy laughter and we carry on. That it was not really a joke, and never really funny, is not confronted.

If you don’t laugh along you get a double sucker punch: the feeling of diminishment that came from the original comment, and then the accusation if you complain or don’t laugh, you’re humourless.

“Aww it was just a joke ... can’t you take a joke, love?”

Man, I have heard that over and over, particularly when working in pubs and someone’s made a “joke” about women or Indigenous people, or gays or people with disabilities or some other group that’s institutionally a bit down on their luck.

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So you say, “yeah, ha, ha, ha!” while thinking but never saying “You’re an idiot.”

Women have had to do this for years – they duck and weave when confronted by lewd comments, unwanted advances, sexual jokes or innuendos that aren’t funny.

We might feel uneasy, but we’ve internalised the need for the “joke-teller” not to feel uncomfortable, not to hurt his ego or wound his pride by not laughing at his joke.

We don’t want to cause a fuss or start a fight.

But increasingly people aren’t playing the game. They’re risking the clubbable mood in the front bar by saying “that joke isn’t funny, it’s offensive” and dealing with the fuss, the fallout, the wounded egos, the defensiveness and the apology that isn’t really an apology.

After a transcript of the show circulated on the internet, McGuire appeared on the Today show saying it was inappropriate to joke about violence against women, but defended the comments as being in the line with the tone of the banter on the day.

But banter where a group of guys talk about standing around and drowning a woman (McGuire suggests charging $10,000 for “everyone to stand around and bomb her”) is not seen as funny anymore, if it ever was. The difference now is the pushback.

There’s been a real renaissance in feminism and LGBTI and people of colour activism over the last decade. Part of that renaissance has involved pushing back. Of refusing to do the duck and weave, of not laughing at the joke, of not being afraid of the discomfort you may cause when you say “that’s not funny”.

Women, for so long the butt of so many jokes, are refusing to do the fake jolly laugh when something’s said that puts them down or puts them in their place.

Right now we’re in that uncomfortable space where the jokes being told aren’t getting the laughs from everyone and the guys at the proverbial front bar are getting a bit pissed off and saying, “Why aren’t you laughing? Can’t you take a joke, love?”

Maybe we could never take a joke, we just pretended to, and the inequalities and assumptions and stereotypes got hard-baked into the stuff of life, making it ever harder to smash them up.

Columnist and cartoonist at the Australian Bill Leak wrote recently about what he sees to be a new punitiveness around joke-telling and that political correctness is to blame. He also says political correctness has much in common with hardline Islam and the philosophies of the Ayatollah.

“Today, virtue signalling and censoriousness are fashionable so it has become the prerogative of the hipster. And with the sanctimonious hordes lying in wait, armed to the teeth with Twitter and Facebook accounts and ready to ambush anyone who transgresses the unwritten laws of the new puritanism, the cartoonist’s job gets harder every day.”

But isn’t this so-called new puritanism just another word for “civil”?

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“The bravery required to call out attitudes one finds distasteful is a trait to be admired. It doesn’t threaten free speech – it broadens debate. It pulls at the threads of our internal fabrics, questions the attitudes and preconceptions we take for granted and asks if there might be a better, kinder way.”

As a species that needs to get along, we need to renegotiate what is really funny and what is just mean and mocking. It’s a good thing. Jokes that rely on someone else’s misfortune or low place in life’s pecking order are often lazy, unoriginal jokes anyway.

It’s not just men. I have told many offensive and off-colour jokes in my time, which I am getting away with less and less these days. Making a joke about rape where no one laughs or using the word “retarded” when you mean something is “wrong”, well, no one is going to miss that sort of humour from me.

Humour is evolving – like everything else. Instead it will be the cleverest, funniest and kindest among us who will really make us laugh.